


Needful Things

by sussexbound (SamanthaLenore)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Grieving John, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-15 08:43:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1298635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SamanthaLenore/pseuds/sussexbound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are words that will never be voiced.  Things that should have been said, but weren’t.  It is too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Needful Things

John sometimes wakes in the wee hours of the morning, sweat running down his spine in rivulets, over his forehead, soaking his hair, dampening the sheets.   He bites back a name he is trying so desperately to forget, so urgently to remember.  The dream is always the same.  Red pools on damp pavement.  Dark curls, like India ink against alabaster skin.  Eyes like spring sky, amber and green amethyst - blank, empty.

His heart rate is up.  His hands shake.  He is unravelling at the seams when he wakes from these dreams. 

It is worse when Mary is there.  He prefers to be alone in times like these – a feral animal, preferring to lick its wounds in isolation.

Mary reaches for him, when she spends the night - soothes ( _attempts to_ ).  Her hands are cool.  They trace firm furrows through his hair.  They brand him, ground him, pull him away from the past and root him firmly in the present.  He is here.  He is hers.  This is what he needs.  This is what is right.

Her eyes are large, wide, cornflower blue.  Different.  Exactly what he wants.  When she tells him it is only a dream, that it is alright, it is over, all over now, he believes her.  In that moment he believes her because Mary is a force you can’t resist.  Her truth becomes your truth.  You ride the tidal force of her will and you have to simply trust that you are going to end up somewhere good.  In those moments her arms feel strong, steady.  They are a constant in an existence that has become completely moorless. 

But, on the nights when she is not there he finds a strange calm, a deeper comfort in the black stillness of the flat, the hum of the refrigerator, the muffled sound of voices and footfall from the flat opposite.  Shadows take on forms so familiar he lets himself imagine, if only for a moment, that they might be what he is looking for.  It is the same thing he is always looking for in every patient that walks into his surgery, in every strange face that passes him on the street.  He is looking for one thing, one man, one name.

Sherlock…

The shadows of his room reach out to sooth on the nights he is alone, the memories too.  He lays in the close, quiet dark and remembers cases, conversations, little snapshots of domesticity played out in a cramped, cluttered flat miles and lifetimes away.

Sometimes he goes back and relives small moments until he can sleep again, the phantom presence of his old friend filling up the empty spaces just enough that he can finally relax.  Sometimes he even smiles.  He revisits mornings filled with tea and frustration, bickering and the strains of violin song. 

On the worst nights he visits intervals and happenings that never were.  He invents them out of sheer desperate need.  Whispers of words never spoken.  The lingering warmth of intimacies never shared.  There are words that will never be voiced.  Things that should have been said, but weren’t.  It is too late. 

He murmurs them sometimes, in that place between waking and sleeping.  He doesn’t think too deeply about it, but some part of him believes that maybe there in that half-light, that purgatory, he might still be heard.


End file.
